Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI EA (cat=Spring Cloud)
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Let's get started with a Microservice Architecture with Spring Cloud:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)
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Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.

Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Reactive – NPI EA (cat=Reactive)
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Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Do JSON right with Jackson

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eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=Http Client-Side)
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Get the most out of the Apache HTTP Client

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eBook – Maven – NPI EA (cat = Maven)
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Get Started with Apache Maven:

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eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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eBook – RwS – NPI EA (cat=Spring MVC)
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Building a REST API with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Get started with Spring and Spring Boot, through the Learn Spring course:

>> LEARN SPRING
Course – RWSB – NPI EA (cat=REST)
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Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

>> The New “REST With Spring Boot”

Course – LSS – NPI EA (cat=Spring Security)
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Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.

I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

You can explore the course here:

>> Learn Spring Security

Course – All Access – NPI EA (cat= Spring)
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All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.

>> GET THE COURSE
Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)
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Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.

Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
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End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (cat=Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

1. Overview

In this quick article, we’ll be looking at the ConcurrentSkipListMap class from the java.util.concurrent package.

This construct allows us to create thread-safe logic in a lock-free way. It’s ideal for problems when we want to make an immutable snapshot of the data while other threads are still inserting data into the map.

We will be solving a problem of sorting a stream of events and getting a snapshot of the events that arrived in the last 60 seconds using that construct.

2. Stream Sorting Logic

Let’s say that we have a stream of events that are continually coming from multiple threads. We need to be able to take events from the last 60 seconds, and also events that are older than 60 seconds.

First, let’s define the structure of our event data:

public class Event {
    private ZonedDateTime eventTime;
    private String content;

    // standard constructors/getters
}

We want to keep our events sorted using the eventTime field. To achieve this using the ConcurrentSkipListMap, we need to pass a Comparator to its constructor while creating an instance of it:

ConcurrentSkipListMap<ZonedDateTime, String> events
 = new ConcurrentSkipListMap<>(
 Comparator.comparingLong(v -> v.toInstant().toEpochMilli()));

We’ll be comparing all arrived events using their timestamps. We are using the comparingLong() method and passing the extract function that can take a long timestamp from the ZonedDateTime.

When our events are arriving, we need only to add them to the map using the put() method. Note that this method does not require any explicit synchronization:

public void acceptEvent(Event event) {
    events.put(event.getEventTime(), event.getContent());
}

The ConcurrentSkipListMap will handle the sorting of those events underneath using the Comparator that was passed to it in the constructor.

The most notable pros of the ConcurrentSkipListMap are the methods that can make an immutable snapshot of its data in a lock-free way. To get all events that arrived within the past minute, we can use the tailMap() method and pass the time from which we want to get elements:

public ConcurrentNavigableMap<ZonedDateTime, String> getEventsFromLastMinute() {
    return events.tailMap(ZonedDateTime.now().minusMinutes(1));
}

It will return all events from the past minute. It will be an immutable snapshot and what is the most important is that other writing threads can add new events to the ConcurrentSkipListMap without any need to do explicit locking.

We can now get all events that arrived later that one minute from now – by using the headMap() method:

public ConcurrentNavigableMap<ZonedDateTime, String> getEventsOlderThatOneMinute() {
    return events.headMap(ZonedDateTime.now().minusMinutes(1));
}

This will return an immutable snapshot of all events that are older than one minute. All of the above methods belong to the EventWindowSort class, which we’ll use in the next section.

3. Testing the Sorting Stream Logic

Once we implemented our sorting logic using the ConcurrentSkipListMap, we can now test it by creating two writer threads that will send one hundred events each:

ExecutorService executorService = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(3);
EventWindowSort eventWindowSort = new EventWindowSort();
int numberOfThreads = 2;

Runnable producer = () -> IntStream
  .rangeClosed(0, 100)
  .forEach(index -> eventWindowSort.acceptEvent(
      new Event(ZonedDateTime.now().minusSeconds(index), UUID.randomUUID().toString()))
  );

for (int i = 0; i < numberOfThreads; i++) {
    executorService.execute(producer);
}

Each thread is invoking the acceptEvent() method, sending the events that have eventTime from now to “now minus one hundred seconds”.

In the meantime, we can invoke the getEventsFromLastMinute() method that will return the snapshot of events that are within the one minute window:

ConcurrentNavigableMap<ZonedDateTime, String> eventsFromLastMinute 
  = eventWindowSort.getEventsFromLastMinute();

The number of events in the eventsFromLastMinute will be varying in each test run depending on the speed at which the producer threads will be sending the events to the EventWindowSort. We can assert that there is not a single event in the returned snapshot that is older than one minute:

long eventsOlderThanOneMinute = eventsFromLastMinute
  .entrySet()
  .stream()
  .filter(e -> e.getKey().isBefore(ZonedDateTime.now().minusMinutes(1)))
  .count();
 
assertEquals(eventsOlderThanOneMinute, 0);

And that there are more than zero events in the snapshot that are within the one minute window:

long eventYoungerThanOneMinute = eventsFromLastMinute
  .entrySet()
  .stream()
  .filter(e -> e.getKey().isAfter(ZonedDateTime.now().minusMinutes(1)))
  .count();
 
assertTrue(eventYoungerThanOneMinute > 0);

Our getEventsFromLastMinute() uses the tailMap() underneath.

Let’s test now the getEventsOlderThatOneMinute() that is using the headMap() method from the ConcurrentSkipListMap:

ConcurrentNavigableMap<ZonedDateTime, String> eventsFromLastMinute 
  = eventWindowSort.getEventsOlderThatOneMinute();

This time we get a snapshot of events that are older than one minute. We can assert that there are more than zero of such events:

long eventsOlderThanOneMinute = eventsFromLastMinute
  .entrySet()
  .stream()
  .filter(e -> e.getKey().isBefore(ZonedDateTime.now().minusMinutes(1)))
  .count();
 
assertTrue(eventsOlderThanOneMinute > 0);

And next, that there is not a single event that is from within the last minute:

long eventYoungerThanOneMinute = eventsFromLastMinute
  .entrySet()
  .stream()
  .filter(e -> e.getKey().isAfter(ZonedDateTime.now().minusMinutes(1)))
  .count();
 
assertEquals(eventYoungerThanOneMinute, 0);

The most important thing to note is that we can take the snapshot of data while other threads are still adding new values to the ConcurrentSkipListMap.

4. Conclusion

In this quick tutorial, we had a look at the basics of the ConcurrentSkipListMap, along with some practical examples.

We leveraged the high performance of the ConcurrentSkipListMap to implement a non-blocking algorithm that can serve us an immutable snapshot of data even if at the same time multiple threads are updating the map.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
announcement - icon

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

Explore the eBook

Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (All)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)